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Why are diggers nuts about Knuttz?

The folks over at Knuttz.net have cracked the code on Digg. So listen up, I’m here to explain to you exactly how they do it (well, with one critical missing detail!)…

(Now, I have a really busy day today so I want to explain things clearly here, but I’ll need to keep it pretty brief…for me, anyway. If I miss some important points, please take them up with me in the comments. Often, as much is learned in the comments as in the post itself.)

Knuttz.net is a site full of pages displaying ads and photos. That’s basically it. Their revenue model is ad banners, pure and simple. If there’s anything else going on there, I have missed it.

I only came across this site a couple of days ago, on the Movers and Shakers page over at Alexa. This page (which is unchanged from a few days back) shows Knuttz ahead of Engadget, in terms of proportional traffic growth, in the last measurement period — and that’s the same Engadget which experience a surge of growth over the iPhone announcement and eye-candy posts. So Knuttz is doing something very right to have grown so phenomenally in such a short space of time.

Alexa’s rank and reach charts for the last month are startlingly clear in showing Knuttz’s stellar performance this month. You can see that something went very very right for Knuttz the minute 2007 hit. But what?

How Knuttz.net is purpose-built for Digg-bait

Knuttz.net is a simple site. It’s page after page after page of “photo essay” with attempts at catchy headlines on each page. Each page is wrapped in ads, and at the bottom of the page is a teaser inviting you to look at another photo page.

Very quickly I realised that at any given moment, EVERY photo page on the site has the SAME teaser link on the bottom. No matter where you are at any given moment, each photo essay page invites you (at the bottom) to go check out another page, and it’s always the same destination page…. site-wide.

Go check it out. Follow the link. Any link.

Now you’re on another photo page on Knuttz that looks like all the rest. Except… lok at the top and bottom of this page… what do you see? A Digg button, and the number of diggs on that button which is below the “popular” threshold set by Digg (in other words, a story that has not yet gone to Digg’s front page).

The Digg button will stay on that page, and that page will remain linked-to from the bottom of every other page on Knuttz, until it either a) goes over Digg’s “popular” threshold (and to Digg’s front page/s) and no longer needs the button on this page, or b) seems to flounder after a certain amount of time passes, and the Knuttz team will try their luck again with another photoset/page (I assume this can happen, but haven’t seen it… all their Digg submissions succeed at the moment!).

Are you following me? In summary, the Knuttz site is one big “traffic funnel”, moving all incoming traffic in the inevitable direction of that Digg button. It’s one very smart strategy.

The view from over at Digg

Knuttz is kicking butt with this strategy. I mean really.

A search on Digg for all submitted stories linking to knuttz.net (along with the Alexa traffic report), reveals that the site has only been around since July last year, and no submitted story had received more than twenty-something diggs until just over two weeks ago. Read that again, in case you missed it. No stories “made popular” until just 15 days ago!

However in the last two weeks, fully 14 stories have gone front page on Digg. That’s getting very close to a front page story per day! Here they are, including the first three of the New Year, which were consecutive submissions(!):

As we Digg “try-hards” know all too well, it’s the first 60 or so diggs that are the hardest to get, after which a story will typically be “made popular”. After that, all you have to worry about is whether your server can cope with the load of incoming traffic… a good worry to have! So I went to a great deal of trouble yesterday to work out whether there was evidence of “syndicate digging behaviour” of Knuttz submissions over a Digg or not, and the short answer is the data doesn’t show anything. I am definitely not throwing any accusations at Knuttz of impropriety.

What is clear, is that with every front page story on Digg, Knuttz will find it easier and easier to get more of their pages onto Digg’s front page in future, since more and more diggers who like Knuttz will bookmark it, return under their own steam, and digg stories “on-page”. What this means is that Knuttz — as an added bonus — is gaining an increasing proportion of their return traffic who are diggers. Think about that…

What can we learn from Knuttz?

I have a few observations and suggestions from my research here:

Build a Digg “traffic funnel” into your site too.

This is what I explained above, in regards to the “traffic funnel” that exists at Knuttz. Of course, it works a treat at Knuttz because the whole raison d’etre of the site is funny/weird photo essays, which makes this funneling of traffic very simple to execute. People clicking through these kinds of sites are there for a bit of lazy fun and they don’t need much convincing to click through. On a blog it’s a different story. You can’t easily “tease” someone at the bottom of one blog post to visit another post that is entire unrelated. But funny/weird photos are always related!

I don’t know who gilfil is, and he’s not putting any identifying data in his Digg profile, but I’m prepared to bet he’s on the Knuttz team, since 8 of the 12 stories submitted to Digg linking to the old Knuttz site (knuttz.yi.org) are his, and he has submitted more stories linking to the current Knuttz site than any other digger. But my point is to give him credit for plugging at it. And if he is Mr Knuttz himself, then he’s carefully bypassed the cultural bad behaviour of submitting one’s own stories by keeping his profile empty.

Some people must know something about Digg that I don’t.

Check out sicc’s profile at Digg. He signed up on the 15th of December… that’s just a little over a month ago. In that remarkably short space of time he has dugg 6,909 stories, submitted 783, and had 94 of those go to the front page. He now ranks 64! Why does he do it? How does he do it? Are you and I supposed to assume that he does this for the love of Digg? If not, how does he “monetize” his time?

If Knuttz or I or anyone else was trying to “rigg” Digg, what would that involve?

This is pure speculation, and I can’t find evidence for it in Knuttz’s case, to be absolutely clear. But this is what I’d assume is done in those cases: a site wanting success on Digg would pay a syndicate of diggers to push a story up to the “popular” threshold. Those diggers would be paid, and either a) would enlist buddies to digg suggested stories, or b) would themselves maintain a large number of Digg accounts to digg with. The latter would be so that in order to fly under the radar, they need never use the same account twice with the same “client”.

If you go looking for them, you can find websites as fronts for Digg syndicates (no links, sorry). These sites are “invitation only” and nowhere mention Digg on their front page, obviously. Digg is trying hard to uncover evidence of this kind of rigging, but it’s hard. If 20 different accounts digg the same story in a small timeframe, and they all originate from the same IP, that might throw a flag over at Digg HQ. I am just guessing. But methinks pro diggers are smarter than that.

All I can say is, I’d like to be a fly on the wall, watching how they’re going about trying to keep Digg clean of these syndicates!

Conclusion

Let’s summarise the Knuttz story, again.

After moderate success in the latter half of 2006, Knuttz traffic suddenly when completely nuts from the moment 2007 arrived, and the good times haven’t slowed down a bit. My research suggests this phenomenal traffic increase is almost entirely due to the sequence of 14 (and counting!) front page Digg stories. And since Knuttz have the formula right, they’re assured plenty more front page stories to come. This is largely because their site’s content is an ideal fit for the Digg demographic (unlike sites and content like mine, which are not just avoided, but often buried… SEO is a bad word over there).

The critical missing detail: I cannot explain why Knuttz suddenly got the “formula” right on January 1, 2007. If someone can show me that it is on that date that they implemented their “traffic funnel”, then that is all the proof needed that it’s indeed a killer strategy. I could go rifling through archive.org but… bummer, nothing there.

If Knuttz people had any interest in transparency whatsoever, we could call them to ask. But as is so often the case with these kinds of projects, the veil of privacy is well and truly drawn: the site lists only an email address; the WHOIS data is all protected, and so on. It just makes it so much easier to ponder if they have anything to hide…

Updates

20 Jan. 2007 – Knuttz have abandoned the funnel tonight, meaning that photo essay pages don’t have the teaser link at the bottom any more. We should see a slowdown on Digg, if this continues. Perhaps they’re feeling the pressure. I’m now not the only one talkingaboutthem.

Also in a blog post yesterday, Mr Knuttz has kindly provided an email address for people wishing to make contact.. so there you go. A clear and open invitation to be contacted. That’s a positive and welcome development. The email address is knuttz dot submit at gmail dot com. The rest of that post addresses issues of copyright on images used on his site. He has his hands full there.

Just one quick question – you say that they have a viel of secrecry drawn, because they only publish their email address. You don’t say, however, whether you tried to contact them via that email address… ?

Andy, I haven’t tried that email address, no. Perhaps my reasoning is all wrong, but if they can’t release any publicly verifiably information about themselves (formally), then I feel like they have already told me that they don’t want to be contacted. It’s your call whether you see things as I do there, but really… if they play that hard to get, they don’t want to be contacted.

I mean, look at their contact page:

About

Any contact should be adressed to webmaster at domain name.

If you do not understand it, you may use the contact email avaliable at the registar information.

That’s it! And webmaster? That’s not an admin email account, that’s a technical account for site-related issues. Where’s any mention of a “service” account? None.

The second line is barely English, and assumes you’re trying to trace them via a WHOIS lookup.

Knuttz is just a website that steals content from everywhere on the internet and display on their website.Have you ever wonder from where they have all those photos ? Can you steal more photos than THEM ?

I’m not going to deliver my research but in synopsis here in a comment. Digg is rigged, and Rose and his band of flunkies couldn’t care less. The idealism of the site has diminished in favor of profit, and Digg will support anyone who keeps visitors flocking to Digg.com

I think it’s disgusting that a site with such potential (even the potential already realized) could turn into a den for the spammers and traffic funnels like the one you referred to.

20 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

Cameron Olthius recently posted about the rise of â€œmade for diggâ€ sites, a phrase coined by Ethan Kaplan, who points out Knuttz as an example. Alister Cameron looked into the Knuttz site and gives a breakdown of how this site funnels visitors in such a way to encourage digg votes. Knuttz is basically a blog that shows clever photographs and interestingly enough, has had 14 stories hit the front page of digg

Cameron Olthius recently posted about the rise of â€œmade for diggâ€ sites, a phrase coined by Ethan Kaplan, who points out Knuttz as an example. Alister Cameron looked into the Knuttz site and gives a breakdown of how this site funnels visitors in such a way to encourage digg votes. Knuttz is basically a blog that shows clever photographs and interestingly enough, has had 14 stories hit the front page of digg

Am I the only one that figured this out? I doubt it. Look at user siccâ€™s profile. He registered December 15, 2006 and as of today heâ€™s the 57th ranked Digg user. Heâ€™s marked 421 people as his friend and 217 people call him a friend. Some peoplesuspect that heâ€™s the mastermindbehind Knuttzâ€™s stellar rise out of nowhere with multiple front-pagers. Of course, this is just speculation. Does a couple front pagers make me an expert? No. But did I figure something out? Perhaps.

[…] for digg” sites, a phrase coined by Ethan Kaplan, who points out Knuttz as an example. Alister Cameron looked into the Knuttz site and gives a breakdown of how this site funnels visitors in such a way […]

[…] of â€œmade for diggâ€ sites, a phrase coined by Ethan Kaplan, who points out Knuttz as an example. Alister Cameron looked into the Knuttz site and gives a breakdown of how this site funnels visitors in such a way […]

[…] of “made for digg” sites, a phrase coined by Ethan Kaplan, who points out Knuttz as an example. Alister Cameron looked into the Knuttz site and gives a breakdown of how this site funnels visitors in such a way […]

[…] images, the creators of Knuttz have been able to boost their profile. Alister Cameron has done some excellent detective work which brings us to the question: has Knuttz been cleverly orchestrating a strategy to […]

[…] Digg user. He’s marked 421 people as his friend and 217 people call him a friend. Some people suspect that he’s the mastermind behind Knuttz’s stellar rise out of nowhere with multiple front-pagers. Of course, this is […]

[…] my previous piece how Digg is being taken advantage of by spammers. No doubt some of you have read Alister’s piece on how a virtually unknown site called Knuttz.net which posts unusual pictures suddenly shot to […]

[…] traffic to posts already receiving high traffic. Hmm, that would be a little bit like what Alister wrote about Knuttz recently. I am not sure of the easiest way to leverage it.. maybe an invisible category […]

[…] months ago, but the submissions never got more than a handful of Diggs before fading away. That all changed last month. The first time a story from the site made it to the home page of Digg was 35 days ago. […]

[…] months ago, but the submissions never got more than a handful of Diggs before fading away. That all changed last month. The first time a story from the site made it to the home page of Digg was 35 days go. […]

[…] This way you can leverage one traffic stream into more streams. Funneling is something that I read about a little while back. The concepts are similar and can be exploited by a good blog theme. Make sure […]

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